Baryshnikov Arts Center Prize Goes to Pam Tanowitz

Pam Tanowitz, a choreographer known for putting a postmodern spin on classical dance idioms and collaborating with composers and visual artists, is this year’s recipient of the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Cage Cunningham Fellowship.

The prize — which comes with $50,000, access to the center’s John Cage and Merce Cunningham Studio for eight weeks and administrative support to create a new work — goes to an artist who reflects the innovative spirits of Cage and Cunningham, life partners and collaborators who were titans of 20th-century music and dance.

Alastair Macaulay of The New York Times wrote in a review last year that Ms. Tanowitz is “an unusually gifted and original dance-maker who makes pieces that seem elaborately uninviting and brilliantly minor-league.”

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From left, Dylan Crossman, Lindsey Jones, Melissa Toogood and Sarah Haarmann in Ms. Tanowitz’s “the story progresses as if in a dream of glittering surfaces,” at the Joyce Theater in 2016.CreditRobert Altman for The New York Times

Mikhail Baryshnikov, who is the center’s artistic director, said in a statement that he and others were impressed “with her intelligence, determination and the skill of her company.” He added, “Her work is not an imitation of dance history, but is a distinct intellectual journey.”

Performances by Ms. Tanowitz’s 15-year-old company are often interdisciplinary efforts that enlist the help of composers, musicians and designers. The first work she plans to create through this fellowship is “Four Quartets,” an evening-length staging of T.S. Eliot’s poem with an original score by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (“L’Amour de Loin”).

“This is a critical moment for me and for my company; we need a place to work, to belong,” Ms. Tanowitz said in a statement. “I imagine my time at BAC will be extremely rich — creating new works and preparing for exciting opportunities ahead.”